When it comes to artificial intelligence, CEOs and their workforces aren’t seeing eye to eye.
Corporate leaders, increasingly in earnings calls and interviews, tout productivity gains and say they are doing right by their workers as they roll out the technology.
But workers are much more concerned about being supplanted, and they don’t trust their company’s executives.
A survey from the Milken Institute-Harris Poll Listening Project recently found that more than two-thirds of business leaders expect they will be better off financially in five years because of AI, while just 27% of the U.S. workforce felt the same way — a whopping 41-point gap.
Workers also see less AI transformation than leadership does. Seventy-three percent of leaders say AI has significantly changed the way work is done, compared with 58% of entry and midlevel employees, according to a report released this month from the Wharton School.
“We have corner offices and cubicles driving the same economy, but living in completely different realities,” John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll, said in an email. “There is a gulf in hope between what leaders think AI could bring to companies and what employees feel it is taking away from them.”
What might be worse is that CEOs don’t seem to recognize the disconnect or that they’re losing the trust of their workers.
For example: Just 15% of CEOs said they were concerned about how their approach to AI could erode their employees’ trust, according to a survey released this month by BCG, a management consulting firm. But 40% of workers said their CEO has not been transparent enough about the impact of AI on their role and career trajectory.
The distrust doesn’t make for a successful transformation, said Julia Dhar, the leader of the North American people and organization practice at BCG and an author of the study.
“You will not get the people you need to start using it more intensively to do so,” Dhar said. “And there is a very good chance you will get backsliding or regression from other people.”
Hemant Taneja, who leads venture capital firm General Catalyst, said the findings of the BCG report were not surprising but relatable.
“When there’s more ambiguity, you need to overcommunicate,” Taneja said in an interview. “I’m feeling the pain of that in my own business as well.”
He said he has been working to build trust by explaining his decisions around AI to employees and founders, especially when they change.
“You have to be vulnerable about the fact that we don’t have all the answers,” Taneja said. “We directionally know where to go, but we don’t know all the answers, and so it’s OK to change assumptions and change your mind.” Dhar said that one CEO she knows starts frank discussions around AI by asking his frontline employees, “What is the silliest thing we do at this company?” The approach works, she said, because it’s not judgmental and the CEO doesn’t have to agree on it or make a promise to look into it further.
“But you’ve given people a really easy way to make their voice heard,” she said.
Tim Walsh, chief of consultancy KPMG, says that when he travels to offices in different cities he makes it a point to sit down with both the partners in the business and employees.
“I need to understand how they’re feeling, I need to understand how the technology is being received and I need to understand their concerns,” Walsh said in an interview. “I will tell you it’s hard to get it at my level.”
Walsh said he hasn’t mastered the art of getting rank-and-file employees to open up completely in front of him. KPMG relies on anonymous employee surveys, where more junior employees can feel freer to complain.
Despite a struggle to build trust with workers around AI, there is a bright spot for CEOs. The distrust Americans have toward them, and specifically their own CEO, is less than it is for other institutions in American life like media outlets, NGOs and government, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, which has been measuring trust levels for 26 years.
The research also found that U.S. employees appreciated hearing from their leaders about AI even when they didn’t have all the answers.
“People are often very realistic about a business reality, and their requests are often quite humble,” Dhar said. “They say, ‘I would just hope the leaders are able to be honest and specific about the changes that we are making and the reason behind them.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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